ItsGeekToMe.co

Q: First I would like to thank you for all the valuable info that you post in your column. It’s very helpful!!! I just have a simple question: Does “tinyurl.com” have an index of its problem solving downloads?

– Carol O.
Freeport, Florida

A: You’re very welcome, Carol. Thank-you for being a loyal reader. I believe you have a misperception of just what exactly TinyURL does. Let me start out by saying no, they don’t have an index of problem solving downloads, sorry. Now let me explain why.

TinyURL is not involved in the contents of the pages that it sends you to, so there wouldn’t be anything for it to index in the first place. TinyURL is a URL shortening service. The acronym URL, of course, is shorthand for Uniform Resource Locator, which is the Geek way of saying “that long string of characters that you type in your browser’s address bar to take you somewhere”. TinyURL’s job is two-fold: first, it allows people to enter a URL of any length (and some of them can be several hundred characters long) and it returns a URL which is, well, tiny. Not including the “TinyURL/” part, they are usually only 6 or 7 characters long. The second part of TinyURL’s job comes when someone tries to use one of these shortened links. It looks-up the URL in its internal database and translates it back into the original, long form. Then, it simply redirects your browser to that location.

The benefits should be obvious. The characters of a URL must be entered precisely, or your browser either will not take you anywhere at all, or it will take you to the wrong place. But URLs often need to be shared via e-mail, Twitter, text message, and even newspaper columns. Every letter that must be transcribed offers an opportunity to hit the wrong key. Then there’s the inevitable mix-up between 0, O, and o, 1, l, i, and I, and so forth. Can you imagine trying to read a 100 character-long URL out of the newspaper, and accurately enter it into your browser? Newspaper columns are rather narrow, so in-print, a long URL would break across several lines and probably have multiple hyphens thrown in for good measure. Twitter messages are a maximum of 140 characters, so some URLs can’t be sent at all. There are other URL shortening services around these days, including Bit.ly, and Goo.gl. TinyURL is merely the one I choose to use for It’s Geek to Me.

The closest thing I can offer you to an index of problem solving downloads would be the search box over at ItsGeekToMe.co. From there, you can perform keyword searches against the entire 360-issue (and growing) archive of the column.

Q: I have searched the internet for how to get back to (Windows) 8.0 but cannot find an answer. Can you tell me how to do that?

– George C.
Shalimar, Florida

A: Sure, George. But first, you might notice that I trimmed quite a bit out of the e-mail you sent me. I did that mostly because the only problems you mentioned were that something “did not work” but you didn’t give me any idea of what that means. That is to say, I need to know what it’s not doing, and if it is throwing an error message, what that message says. Very few things simply “do not work” without displaying a failure message of some sort.

As for getting back to Win 8.0, there is not really a mechanism to downgrade. However, you can always use a Restore Point or perform a re-installation of the operating system using the discs that originally came with your PC. But there is no automated method to “uninstall” Win 8.1 once you’ve upgraded.